Building an AI Streaming Response UI: How to Reveal Rich Text Without Breaking Your HTML
How to stream an AI response in plain JavaScript — a 12-line tag-aware slicer, a blinking cursor, Stop generating, and the real fetch + SSE swap.
Building an AI Streaming Response UI: How to Reveal Rich Text Without Breaking Your HTML
Streaming is the single feature that makes an AI product feel fast. The model still takes eight seconds to finish its answer, but the first token lands in a few hundred milliseconds — and if you paint that token immediately, the wait stops being a wait and becomes reading time. Every serious assistant does it, and copying the look is easy: reveal characters on a timer and blink a cursor at the end. Then you try it with an answer that contains bold text , a bulleted list, and a code block, and it falls apart. Slice <strong>streaming</strong> at the fourth character and you've just written <str into the DOM. The AI Streaming Response snippet is a complete streaming UI — blinking cursor, token counter, Stop generating, copy and regenerate — and the interesting dozen lines in it are the ones that solve exactly that problem. Here it is live — hit regenerate to watch it stream again: Grab the code, or open the full editor with live HTML/CSS/JS panels: AI Streaming Response on…
